Poll-ish Humor, May 25 -- Highbrow

I just recently learned an astounding literary fact. One of the world's most famous poems, "Ozymandias," by Shelley, has a doppelganger. It is a similar poem, on the identical topic, making the same point. It was written by one of Shelley's friends, the unsung poet Horace Smith, at the same time Shelley wrote Ozymandias. Both were published in the same magazine. The two poems were essentially a friendly bet: Which man could do a better job with a prearranged literary task? Literary history has made its judgment; who is to say if it is right?

Here is "Ozymandias," by Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

And here is “Ozymandias,” by Smith:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Which poem is better?

Shelley's

Smith's